How to save a life

When I was about 14 at school I had a best friend called L. I can’t remember how we met or became close. What I do remember is how he made me laugh until my ribs ached, and how I used to tell him he was the funniest person in the year, possibly the funniest person I knew. When we were around our other friends he used to ask me - “Ailis, who’s the funniest person in the year?” “You are, L,” I would reassure him.

He lived by the station and I used to take the train to and from school, so we would walk together. Once we were walking in the dark and L stopped the traffic so we could help a frog across the road to safety. Rather than just wheeling his bike, he would always ride next to me and match my pace as I walked - the “douchebag slow cycle thing”. I hated it so much, but he’d do it anyway and grin and grin.

He came up with the nickname Snail for me (Ailis→Snailish→you get it). I strongly objected to this because I was actually the fastest girl in the year over 300m (going off the results of year 10 sports day). But it was an endearing nickname. He used to text me “night Snail” at the end of a long school day.

One evening we hung around around school to go to the opening of a new Five Guys restaurant in the leisure park in Cambridge. We (fine, I) got thoroughly overexcited at the vast range of options on the fizzy drinks machine, while he acted like he’d seen it all before, but I could tell he also found it very cool. Any soda you could think of in any flavour you could think of - grape Fanta, peach Sprite, and so on - plus the infinite combinations you could create by mixing them in different proportions. L used to offer to go and refill my drink, only to return with a cup full of nothing but ice cubes and cloudy lemonade diluted down with water. I would excitedly take a sip then quickly grimace. Fell for it every time.

Sometimes I would get a later train home and we’d go to L’s after school. His mum, Sam, loved having me there, I think; the old “oh, it’s so nice L’s got a friend who’s a girl!”. She drank and smoked cigarettes in the house and I always used to notice going up to L’s room how filthy the stair carpet was. L’s room had a window you couldn’t shut, and it gaped wide open even in winter. We would lie under the covers and listen to The Fray’s ‘How to Save a Life’. He would sing it and I would listen.

As we got older, it got complicated. I was embroiled in boy drama, and L turned nasty, which I now understand - and I think he did try and explain - was out of a desire to protect me from my own stupid teenage decisions. We fought a lot and then stopped speaking and hanging out just us, and I missed him and the innocence and laughter of our friendship dearly. I still saw him, of course, in groups, but the closeness we had had was gone, and I still don’t really understand how it happened.

The loss was painful and felt significant, much bigger than myself and bigger than our friendship. It felt like a kick from life: people change, friendships fade, that’s the way it goes. We did talk again, of course, but it never went back to how it was.

In the November after we left school, I woke up to a message from a friend in the year below saying that the whole school had just been informed during an assembly that a student who had recently left had passed away. Who, I asked. And in response came L’s name. First name and surname.

I called my best friend and she picked up in tears and I have never ever forgotten what she said. “Mate, L hung himself”. There was so much desperation in the words, as though she felt that by offering me them and their meaning I could help somehow and change what they meant and L wouldn’t be dead anymore, or something.

“What?” I said and immediately began to cry too but I didn’t even register that I was crying. Then I stood in the shower and sobbed and sobbed and sobbed and sobbed.

I got the details over the course of the day. He’d done it with a belt, at his dad’s house in London. He’d ordered a pizza. Who the fuck orders a pizza they know they’ll never eat. His dad found him.

The day after, I went to his house with a handful of his other close friends, all boys. His mum was drunk and hugged us. We all sat round the table and at one point I couldn’t bear it and ran out into the garden in tears. Sam came out carrying a cigarette and a glass of rosé. “It does what you want it to do,” she said as she handed these to me. When the boys and I left we all hugged silently on the doorstep and went our separate ways, each wrapped in our own grief.

We all went out clubbing the night before the funeral and I was delayed in the morning because I had to scramble to find something black and find a fiver to fill my car up with petrol. L was buried - and still is buried - at a woodland burial ground. No gravestones, just small wooden signs in the earth marking each body; trees, flowers, benches, paths.

On that day it was not beautiful. It was heartbreaking and desperate and monochrome and wretched. I was late and couldn’t get inside the hall to watch the service as dozens of people were spilling out of the entrance. Boys in the year above in crumpled suits. Some of our teachers. Other faces. I stood among them.

Then the coffin was carried out. It was the first time I’d seen one. It was wicker and had handles like a basket. It was loaded onto a car and we all followed behind, walking in silence along a path lined on both sides with grassy graves. The newly-dug hole was waiting empty and the coffin lowered down into it. L’s family members each sprinkled dirt on top, and then the celebrant asked if anybody else would like to. Nobody moved, but then I stumbled forward and took a handful of earth and scattered it on top of my friend. Others followed suit.

My most vivid memories from that day. First, how the dirt felt in my hand and leaving my hand. Second, the sight of a boy in my year - a tall, popular and charismatic guy - standing with tear-streaked cheeks, shoulders hunched, in one of the suits he used to wear to school, a picture of grief imprinted against the grey of the sky and the wreckage of a life and the total absence of beauty in the day. How can a moment truly be this sad? I remember searching around me for anything, something, panicking, turning my head this way and that way. My shaking hands trying to roll cigarettes and dropping filters and my boots muddy and seeing my school friends’ faces and feeling so much anger and thinking you didn’t know L I knew L what are you doing here fuck off fuck off fuck off

L’s mum died about a year and a half later. Grief.